A nice neat weight, but I am not sure it should be thought of as a 'pioneer of design', given the tremendous range of millefiori paperweights that various French factories (and Bohemian, and English, and American) were making as much as 80 years earlier. I am pretty sure that many of Paul and Salvador's designs were based on the Belgian / Alsace / French / Bohemian pieces that they saw when they were based in Paris around 1914. That includes the harlequins, spiders, sulphides, and some of their lampwork and millefiori designs.

Alan

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Alan"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." Abraham Lincoln.

The comments in this posting reflect the opinion of the author, Alan Thornton, and not that of the owners, administrators or moderators of this board. Comments are copyright Alan Thornton.http://www.pwts.co.uk

Hi Roger. Not quite sure what you mean by a barrel cane, but if it is the use of rods placed on their side as part of a pattern, then it was certainly done in the 19th century.

Most common of course was the use of latticino or ribbon canes for this purpose, especially by Clichy. Paul Ysart used a similar approach in quite a few of his paperweights for the spokes. (Top image: Clichy left, Paul Ysart right)

There are antique paperweights with sections of millefiori rod placed on their side on purpose, but these are uncommon, I admit. The second image shows a paperweight with a garland of millefiori rod sections - unknow French / Belgian maker still being researched.

There are a number of examples of early Bohemian paperweights (from the Josephinenhutte) with whole or split cane sections placed on their side in Peter von Brackel's book 'Classic paperweights from Silesia / Bohemia'. I cannot reproduce them here for copyright reasons, of course.

Alan"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." Abraham Lincoln.

The comments in this posting reflect the opinion of the author, Alan Thornton, and not that of the owners, administrators or moderators of this board. Comments are copyright Alan Thornton.http://www.pwts.co.uk

The term "barrel cane" may have been something that either I or Terry Johnson (*) gave to Paul Ysart's use of short lengths of millefiori cane which showed the internal colour at both ends and gave them an appearance somewhat like a water or beer barrel! I may have used the term in in article somewhere but if so, I currently have no idea where or when.

(*) Terry Johnson was one of my first contacts, regarding Paul Ysart weights, through the Cambridge Paperweight Circle. His Ysart collection was, at the time, probably the largest in the UK and I remain greatly indebted to Terry for his many discussions on the subject and for introducing me to the fun and games of using longwave & shortwave fluorescence as a possible tool for suggesting the manufacturing periods of Ysart weights.